Angels & Demons: In Praise of Ken Russells The Devils
Indeed, the scenes that most alarmed censors at the time were precisely those in which the sacred became flesh, where religious iconography could no longer remain safely symbolic, where devotion became indistinguishable from lust, performance and bodily excess. This is where Derek Jarman’s artistic contribution becomes particularly significant. The Devils was his first feature film production design credit, marking an early encounter with avisual vocabulary he would continue to develop throughout his filmmaking career. His vision of Loudun was an anachronistically pristine, monumental city of geometric severity that drew on modernist and neoclassical architectural ideas as well as the stark visual worlds of Carl Theodor Dreyer and FritzLang.
Five years later, Jarman would take precisely this conflict between religious authority and unruly embodiment into his own debut feature, Sebastiane, which he co-directed with Paul Humfress and which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Where Russell turns Catholic imagery into an extravagant meditation on institutional power, sexual repression and religious hysteria, Jarman appropriates and radically abstracts it as alanguage for queer desire, persecution and survival – in this case through the figure of Saint Sebastian. The Christian martyr’s nude, bound body penetrated by arrows had already acquired ahomoerotic charge through centuries of Western art; Jarman refuses to leave that charge at the level of subtext, elevating it to text, making homoeroticism not an illicit meaning beneath the image, but the image itself.
In the Sardinian landscape of Sebastiane, inhabited by largely naked Roman soldiers (famously, Jarman explained the nudity by saying the production “couldn’t afford costumes”), Leonardo Treviglio’s taciturn martyr refuses to reciprocate the advances of his lustful commanding officer Severus (Barney James), enduring torture without yielding or displaying any pain. His exposed body becomes an object that refuses correction altogether, unlike with Sister Jeanne, whose deformity is experienced as ahumiliation from which she longs to be freed. This is perhaps the crucial shift from Russell to Jarman – the “rebel hump” is less asymbol of rebellion than away to imagine what happens when the thing that’s supposed to be flattened, corrected, smoothed out, becomes the source of the work itself: unbeholden and unbound.
